


Moonrise

by Xalts



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: AU: Rem writes Light's name, Gen, Unnamed Shinigami
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 11:16:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15728289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xalts/pseuds/Xalts
Summary: Found in my Google docs, written around September last year.--Light Yagami dies on a Tuesday.





	Moonrise

Light Yagami dies on a Tuesday.

Every detail of it is burned into L’s memory like a brand against his own flesh. The investigation room. Minutes spent staring at screens, lists of obituaries, searching for the common thread. Light’s hand resting on the back of L’s chair, fingertips brushing the top of his shoulder, sharing a minutiae of warmth between them. He leans over him, shifting slightly as if too-aware of how close they are, to point out a detail on L’s screen, a name that’s come up before, and that launches a new conversation, bringing up details from months ago into sudden and startling relevance.

No one but Matsuda even glances as the shinigami, Rem, takes her leave, disappearing through a wall as she is wont to do, but L notices it like he notices every detail. A feeling begins to grow in his throat, like  _ something _ is coming, something important, but he can’t quite see what it is yet, and that annoys him. So he turns back to the screen, tunes back into Light’s voice, and so notices intimately when his tone stumbles.

Light’s grip on the back of the chair tightens, fingertips scraping against vinyl, and that steady tone suddenly chokes and gasps. Barely daring to think, to look, L turns his head ever so slightly, enough for his eyes to connect with Light’s - wide, and more scared than L has ever seen him, even when Yagami had him at gunpoint - and then Light is stumbling to the ground, the blood draining from his face, and despite the vague sense of worry L can feel in his throat - it was worry, he realises, because he’s never worried like that before - more than anything, he’s  _ fascinated _ , enraptured by the wet choking sound Light makes as the impact of hitting the ground forces the air out of his lungs, and the shakiness of his hand as he clutches at his chest, and then, finally, the moment Light turns to look at L.

The team are swarming him, calling for help, limbs and bodies passing across his field of view, but L’s sight is locked on Light’s. He remains perched in his chair, head barely turned, body motionless, watching as the confusion on Light’s face turns to panic, and then just as quickly turns to anger, pure, unbridled fury, and every facet of it directed at L. And L knows, in that moment, that he has won.

It’s an empty victory without the evidence L needed to cement Light as Kira. It’s unsatisfying, an anti climax to what L had hoped would be a hard-fought battle. As he looks down at Light, propped up in Matsuda’s arms and staring up at him with fervent scrutiny, Light’s twisted scowl shifts, just slightly, into the smallest of smirks, before the last pith of life drains from him.

L knows what that smirk was for. It was for Light’s victory, the victory they share. A victory of nothingness. They both win, so no one loses. It’s bitter. It hurts.

Misa Amane disappears on a Thursday.

Despite Light’s death, the murders continue, and L theorizes they will probably do so for the next twenty-three days. He doesn’t put it past Light to have planned that far ahead, and besides, he needs this time to solidify his grasp on the second Kira. With Amane being the prime suspect, the investigation turns its focus on her, but like dust in the corner of his eye, drifting forever out of focus, she seems to disappear the moment he turns his gaze to her.

The rest of the team seem content to let her go and to wait out the next twenty days. Matsuda in particular seems to be taking it harder than the rest, and often excuses himself, but L puts all emotion aside - after all, he’s not sure if what he’s feeling is even describable as an emotion. Instead, he tracks Amane’s progress to the airport. It’s easy enough to access the security system and take command of the CCTV, and he watches motionlessly as she boards a plane bound for Los Angeles. He wonders if this was planned, some kind of contingency that Light left for her to follow if he died. Then he sees the memory of Light’s final smirk burned to the back of his eyelids.

He lets her go.

Aizawa and Mogi search her room and find she’s left most things behind, taking only essentials. L thinks that this was obvious, considering the size of the bag she was carrying. Everything is as he’d expected, except for a small pile of ashes sat on top of a sheet of paper on the coffee table. It’s left as if to present them for examination. With a strange certainty that pushes aside the conflict in his heart, L knows; this was Amane’s notebook.

That makes two. One that was Kira’s, handed over as evidence, and one that was the second Kira’s, used in the absence of Kira’s own, now naught but ashes.

On Saturday, they find the third, resting in a pile of soft white dust in a rarely-used storeroom adjacent to their investigation room. One glance tells L that this is the notebook that the shinigami Rem had strapped to her belt, her own personal notebook. The dust, which none but L will touch out of some kind of respect for the fallen shinigami, is not a material belonging to this world. He considers experimenting with it, but after a short period of handling, it crumbles and fades into nothingness.

On Saturday the murders stop.

L does read the notebook, but only the final page. It tells him what he needs to know. Then he places it in the same drawer as Kira’s, locks it tight and leaves the building.

***

Light Yagami is buried on a Thursday.

L chooses not to attend the funeral. His chest is still muddied with a powerful swirl of unidentified emotion that is uniquely mysterious to him, and no matter how many times he attempts to start work on a new case, or how many sweets he forces himself to consume, it refuses to settle. After his attempts spiral past the teens into the twenties, he accepts defeat and has Watari forward the cases to  _ those two _ at Wammy’s House and shuts himself in one of his many hideaways. He passes days staring at the data from the Kira investigation, searching, hoping, for a lost thread that he failed to connect.

He’s used to time slipping between his fingers like sand, especially when he loses himself in thought, but L is startled by how fast two months pass. Near and Mello have been handling his cases flawlessly - he asked them to work together and they refused, but it’s fine, he won’t force them - and the investigation team have returned to work at the NPA. He has to dig a little deeper to make sure Misa Amane hasn’t been up to anything suspicious, but every report of her developing acting career in Los Angeles seems legitimate, and besides, there’s been no more reports of criminals dying of sudden heart attacks, so L rules out any chances of the second Kira still being active.

Everything is quiet in a way that disconcerts him, and yet… And yet, there’s a feeling he felt once before, disgustingly familiar; a saccharine sense of worry that claws its way up his throat and brings with it a sense of something to come. Something big.

It arrives on a Thursday, exactly three months after the death of Light Yagami.

When L wakes up, he’s in the same position he fell asleep in, squatting on top of his office chair. It happens within seconds of him opening his eyes, as if it was waiting for him; a notebook falls onto the desk in front of him and lands with a soft pat. L ignores it at first and looks up, but the ceiling is the same as it’s ever been, and there’s no way it could have been up there without him noticing. Then he spins the chair around by pushing one hand against the desk and scans the rest of the room behind him. Everything is unchanged. Finally, he spins back to face his desk and looks down at the notebook.

The texture of the black cover is almost identical to that of the notebook he’d spent hours poring over in the investigation room, though there’s something slightly smoother about it. The white symbols across the front are completely unfamiliar, and he can’t identify them as any human language he knows. L wonders why it appeared before him. Then, without meaning to, he wonders how a notebook appeared before Light Yagami. Had it chosen him in the same way?

Finally, fearlessly and with steady hand, L reaches out and picks up the notebook. At the same time, he turns his head to catch sight of the figure stood in the center of his room, waiting patiently for him to accept its gift.

The figure is unnaturally tall, with long, thin limbs clad in surprisingly casual-looking clothes; grey-blue pants, an off-white buttoned shirt, a long black coat. L’s keen eyes soak in every detail from the red scarf tied to the belt to the exact pattern of the cracks on its skull-like face, and an equally-sharp red gaze shines back under lifted goggles, no doubt likewise drinking in L’s appearance.

“A shinigami?” L says in a way that comes out more tentative than he’d intended, though it’s definitely more statement than question. Nonetheless, the figure nods as an answer. L lifts the notebook delicately between two fingers. “The one who haunts this notebook?”

“Yes,” the shinigami replies in a steady tone with strangely-familiar cadence. “It is the Death Note, an instrument of ruination.”

For a moment, L is surprised by the gentleness of his voice compared to the gravelly tones Rem had used. Then he places the notebook down on the desk with a softness unbefitting of such a thing, and holds the same hand out to the shinigami.

“I am L,” he says. The shinigami looks down at his outstretched hand for long enough that L considers retracting it, but with a slight creaking noise, his arm swings upwards, easily covering the gap between them with its length, and a rough, dry hand takes L’s and shakes it firmly. In the mere moments of their contact, L etches into his memory the texture, the temperature, the frayed hems of the coat sleeves and the heavy bracelets encompassing them. Then the hand is pulled carefully away, leaving a dusty residue, and pressed to the shinigami’s chest, above where a heart would be if one were to beat in such a creature, as he bows, ever so slightly, by way of greeting.

“L,” the shinigami says, “I am Muun.”

There’s more faint creaking, like old leather rubbing against itself, as the shinigami straightens up, but L barely hears it. His brain has been kicked into overdrive.

“Muun,” he repeats quietly, and thinks  _ Ah,  _ and  _ Tsuki _ , and a specific kanji, the shape of it projecting in his mind’s eye and overlaying with the sight of Muun in front of him in a way that gathers all the unknown emotions plugging up L’s chest and twists them down into a tiny kernel of  _ something _ that L has to hold close, in secret, until the time is right.

For the first time in three months, L smiles.


End file.
